Fireburst, Fundy and Strings

My final three finishes for 2018 are ready for their big reveal. The first is my Fireburst quilt, made during Tish's quilt along. 

Tish published clear, step by step instructions each month to make a quilt in one of two sizes. I chose the baby size, with a final block size of 32" x 32". I added a simple border to bring it up to 37" square.

It was really fun to watch my piles of navy, baby blue, and orange morph into this bursting star design!  So cool.

I used some wool batting scraps and a pieced backing, and quilted it up with floppy feathers. The result is a super light, but fat and poofy quilt.

I'll be donating this to Little Lambs, which is located in Utah and serves childen in the foster care system. I figure the wool will make it nice and warm for a small person who could use a quilty hug.

The second piece was made using the Fundy Skies pattern by Cannuck Quilter. Joanne asked me to be a pattern tester for the baby size, which is a single block. I pulled out some red, navy, gold and gray fabrics to play with. 

The pattern was really easy to follow, and I love this on-point square shape! However, the fabrics I chose didn't feel very baby-ish.  Hm, what to do? I had some small panel blocks in a lighthouse theme, so I added those to the top and bottom of the Fundy block to make the quilt a rectangle.

Fundy Lighthouses finishes at about 36" x 50", which is a great wheelchair quilt size. The narrow width keeps the quilt from getting caught in the wheels, but it is still long enough to warmly cover an adult's lap. I used the rest of more wool batting to keep is light and cozy, and quilted it with a medium stipple using variegated blue and white thread. 

The thread is really pretty on the spool, but I feel there was too much contrast between the darkest and lightest parts of the variegation. In the future I'll look for more subtle shading for that type of thread. 

With the nautical lighthouses and the patriotic colors, perhaps this quilt will appeal to a Navy vet.  I'll send it to my friend Doris, and her guild in Alabama will pass it along to a nursing home.

And here's the final finish for 2018. I've been making string blocks each month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and I love them! It's so satisfying to turn a jumbled pile of miscellaneous strings into neat, tidy blocks. 

However, I used fabric foundations for the stitching, so the blocks turned out double thickness and quite heavy. Rather than make a complete, but heavy quilt, I decided to donate this 50" x 70" top to Victoria's Quilts. They will quilt it up with a warm flannel backing and give it to a person in Canada who is living with cancer. I figured it's cold enough up in the neighborly north for a super heavy quilt to be useful.

And here is an early glimpse into some things I've been playing with lately. I bought a mini Quick Curve Ruler to try some new curvy blocks. Isn't this a fun shape? It's supposed to be a Christmas ornament, but I used a charm pack of pretty metallic pastels and has a different feel. Sort of Moorish.

I also delved into my neutrals and brights string scraps and made some rectangular blocks using paper foundations. I don't want to end up with another set of double thick, heavy string blocks with fabric foundations. I really like  the wonky diamond shapes but the paper bits are annoying.  I was tickled to read that Diann of Little Penguin Quilts is also making rectangular/diamond string blocks, and hers look so great in red and cream. So interesting how an idea like this seems to pop up in multiple places at once!

Turks and Caicos Islands

Greetings from the beautiful islands of the Turks and Caicos! We are docked in a marina in the city of Providentiales. The marina is nothing special, the docks are pretty beat up from various hurricanes, but it makes a great base to explore this island.

Since we arrived, I've managed to finish two more tops for the Hands2Help charity Victoria's Quilts. This one went together very quickly because the leaf blocks were already hanging out in the block orphanage. The center section is four small autumn themed house panels, which I surrounded with a charm pack that matched the leaf blocks. A few dusky purple sashing pieces and some larger chunks of apple fabric in all the same colors, and it was done.  

This double four patch top has been my leaders/enders project for over a year. When I started stitching together pairs of 2.5" squares, I decided to do no color matching at all. I just sorted the squares roughly into darks and lights and paired them up in that way. Same thing when sewing together 2-patches into 4-patches, and again when adding in the larger squares: ignore the color, look only at value. The stacks of blocks finally got tall enough for me to count them and see I was pretty close to having enough for Victoria's preferred size (approximately 50"x70".) A few concentrated hours to make the final blocks and I was ready to make the top. 

I'll admit that it totally looked like scrap vomit in the block stage. I was pretty discouraged because all I could see was ugly color combos. There was some agonizing until I used my phone's black and white filter to look at the top. Hey, the dark and light diagonals show up pretty well! At least it has some structure. 

And when I stepped back to take this photo, I thought, wow, this value thing really does work. All those icky browns and strange purples mixed with lime green and bright orange turned into a classic scrap quilt. Actually, before that I thought, "Um, it's sideways."And, "I wish the sun was out." But around here, you take photos in the two minutes that the wind isn't blowing, no matter how bad the lighting or sideways the quilt.

I also finished my yellow spiral blocks for this month's RSC. I took to heart several comments that encouraged me to use dark golds to get the contrast necessary for the spiral shape to show. I'm happy with these!

I'll leave you with this photo of a local road that ends in Chalk Sound. That's me standing next to my little scooter, Allegro, squinting into the strong sun and wearing a shirt the exact same color as the water. We unloaded the scooters for the first time in a foreign country and I drove on the left side of the road for the first time in my life. All the intersections are roundabouts, which twisted my brain up a bit initially. It's an adventure! We were a bit nervous about the legality of using our own bikes here, but the Customs official didn't seem to think it was a big deal, and the police car that passed us didn't give us a second look even with our Florida license plates.

The UPS quilt

Today I finished this quilt top made completely of 2.5" wide scraps from my "dark neutrals" and "light but darker than off white neutrals" bins. I've been wanting to make a black and white quilt, but didn't have enough black scraps. So I added brown. The pattern is Myra's Jelly Roll Waves, which I won for participating in the Splash of Color QAL. It measures 50"x70".

When Sean saw the top, his first response was the UPS slogan, "What can Brown do for you?" So that's what I named it. If you click over to Myra's site, you'll see the "waves" in most of the photos are bright colors against a contrasting neutral. That's what appealed to me about the pattern. In my mind, this quilt was going to look like dark ribbons of chocolate against cream. But the high contrast isn't there, and I was originally kind of disappointed in that. However, it has really grown on me. 

There are tons of really fun scraps in this top, from old fashioned telephones to camping tents to snowmen to chili peppers to leaves and dog bones. The mix of browns and blacks and the softer contrast with the tan/taupe/gray background pieces gives it a more homey, old fashioned feeling. 

I made it specifically to donate to Victoria's Quilts as part of Hands2Help. Victoria's provides quilts to people in Canada who are living with cancer, and they've asked for tops only, not completed quilts. I think this top has a nice, masculine and almost woodsy vibe that could provide warmth and comfort to a man who is ill. Maybe he'll enjoy finding the little hidden images in all my scraps. 

I started piecing WCBDFY? when we were still in the Berry Islands and the water was this gorgeous turquoise. The water is this color when it is shallow, around 15-20 feet deep.

When the water is this lovely clear blue it means it is deeper. Much deeper. Yesterday we crossed over depths of 10,000 feet, almost 2 miles straight down. It was a little rough so I didn't sew until we made it all the way into Nassau harbor. Today we were back in turquoise waters, flat calm and lovely. I was able to finish the top while we were underway. While I love looking at the water, 6 hours of chugging away at 6mph leaves plenty of time to nip down to the studio for 10 minute sewing bursts. Enough little bursts and many seams are sewn.

For those of you who asked if I was able to put my sewing machine on the back deck to sew, the answer is not yet due to wind! I tried to capture the wind in my hair in this photo. That thing on my ear is my hands-free microphone headset for communicating with the captain while out on deck. I raise and lower the anchor on the foredeck while Sean maneuvers the boat from inside the pilot house. We learned early on that electronic doohickey communicators are real marriage savers! No yelling with these puppies, just conversation at normal volume levels. One of our training captains told us that you can use hand signals, too, but most couples still manage to yell at each other using only their hands and proceeded to pantomime an argument about where to anchor that ended with a flurry of hilarious gestures that left me in tears of laughter.